Formal logic works with identities and distinctions. Understanding complex systems requires explaining how both emerge and persist through the relations that sustain them.
The madness of America is not an isolated national pathology. It reveals how communication synchronises ordinary human vulnerabilities, reproducing antagonism, institutional authority and collective irrationality.
Reality cannot be complete: absence, difference and delay sustain the recursive probabilistic dynamics through which (self-) organisation persists.
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The Logic that Lives
Life is organised difference sustained through recursive probabilistic and spectral dynamics.
Cruelty grows through small, rational choices that make power easier to preserve and other people easier to discard.
I went to a School of Cybernetics hoping to develop ideas about how systems organise and reproduce themselves. My experience instead prompted an unexpected examination of institutional authority, intellectual exclusion and the patterns through which institutions reproduce themselves.
Absence is not the opposite of existence, but the generative condition through which difference, organisation, consciousness and cosmos emerge and persist.
The power to destroy an institution does not confer the authority to abolish it. The United States cannot extinguish the International Criminal Court through coercion without replacing the legal principles upon which its own claims to sovereignty and authority depend.
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Peace, man…
You wouldn’t think peace would be so difficult, but we’ve built an entire civilisation around making war easier.
A civilisation that turns its moral deterioration into public spectacle reorganises the relationships through which political power is recognised, contested and reproduced, making cruelty both a symptom of its decline and a means of perpetuating it.
Our extraordinary technological and expressive abundance conceals a narrowing of possibility, as the systems rewarding innovation and success make civilisation increasingly fragile.
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The Precarity of Thinking
Ideas are fragile, and their expression more so. In a culture increasingly synchronised by fear, hatred and repetition, independent thought becomes an act of integrity, and the freedom to communicate something genuinely different becomes increasingly precious.
